With the development of communications technology and the popularization of mobile terminals such as smart phones, phablets and tablet computers and the like, video calling, as an important service in the field of communications, is being favored by more and more users. More and more users are choosing to communicate through video calls for personal and for business meetings. Generally, in a video call such as, for example, a video conference session, one concern is maintaining good visual and audio connection between the parties to the video call whilst enabling the parties to the video call to periodically exchange information by, for example, sending each other media files or media data such as, for example, still images, text documents, instant messages and the like. However, with existing arrangements, it is typically the case that a user is required to pause a video call on their mobile terminal in order to then use such mobile terminal to send an image or a text document or the like to one or more other participants to the video call and to then resume the video call on their mobile terminal once the discrete media data sending operation is completed. Likewise, the receiving party also typically needs to pause the video call on their mobile terminal in order to receive and view a discrete media file received from another participant before resuming the video call on their mobile terminal. This type of video call arrangement may be generally acceptable to users involved in video calls where there is little or no need to periodically exchange information such as discrete media data or where there is little or no need for exchanged media data to be accessed during the video call session.
In other video call arrangements where a participant is not required to pause the video call in order to send or receive discrete media files or data such as in the case where the display of the mobile terminal is split into two regions; a first region for viewing the video call and a second region for viewing discrete media data or files; problems are still encountered in that users have a tendency to re-orientate the position of their mobile terminal dependent on whether they are viewing the video call on the first region of the screen or viewing discrete media data or files on the second region of the screen. The re-orientation of the mobile terminal during the video call may disrupt the video and/or audio connection with other participants which is undesirable where the participants are engaged in an exchange of views and information.
The aforementioned types of video call arrangement are not generally suitable for video call applications where participants need to frequently exchange discrete media files or data whilst sharing opinions and views on the exchanged discrete media files or data, for example, in collaborative technical development video calls such as brain-storming sessions or the like.
There is therefore a need for improved or enhanced video call functionality for mobile terminals.